# How to Purl: A Step-by-Step Guide for Beginners
If you've already learned the knit stitch, congratulations — you're halfway to knitting almost anything. The other half is the purl stitch. Once you can knit and purl, you can combine them to create ribbing, seed stitch, cables, and the smooth fabric called stockinette that shows up in sweaters, hats, and scarves everywhere.
Purling can feel awkward the first time you try it, mostly because your hands are moving in what feels like the "wrong" direction. That's completely normal. This guide breaks the purl stitch down into simple steps, explains how it works with the knit stitch, and covers the mistakes almost every beginner makes so you can catch them early.
What Is the Purl Stitch?
The purl stitch is essentially the knit stitch worked in reverse. Instead of inserting your needle into the front of a stitch and pulling the yarn from behind, you insert it into the front of the stitch from the opposite side and pull the yarn through from the front. The result looks different, too: a knit stitch creates a smooth "V" shape on the fabric, while a purl stitch creates a small horizontal bump.
That single difference — V versus bump — is the key to almost everything in knitting texture. Every pattern stitch you'll ever learn is really just knits and purls arranged in different combinations.
Before You Start: Yarn Position Matters
The biggest adjustment when moving from knitting to purling is where your working yarn sits. When you knit, the yarn stays in back of your work. When you purl, the yarn needs to sit in front of your work, between your two needles, before you make the stitch.
Forgetting to move the yarn to the front is the single most common reason beginners "accidentally knit" when they meant to purl — more on that below.
How to Purl: Step-by-Step Instructions
Grab your needles with a few practice stitches cast on, and work through these steps slowly the first few times.
- Bring your yarn to the front. With the working yarn coming from your last stitch, move it between the two needles so it sits in front of your work, facing you.
- Insert the right needle into the first stitch from the front, moving right to left. Push the tip of your right-hand needle into the loop on your left-hand needle so the right needle ends up behind the left needle, entering the stitch from front to back rather than back to front as in a knit stitch.
- Wrap the yarn counterclockwise around the right needle. Bring the working yarn up and over the tip of the right needle, wrapping it around from front to back. Getting the wrap direction right here matters — wrapping the wrong way twists the stitch (more on fixing that later).
- Guide the right needle tip back through the original stitch. With the yarn wrapped, gently draw the right needle tip down and through the loop on the left needle, carrying the new loop of yarn along with it.
- Slide the old stitch off the left needle. Once the new loop has passed through, let the original stitch drop off the tip of the left needle. You've completed one purl stitch, and it now sits on your right needle.
- Repeat across the row. Move to the next stitch on the left needle and repeat steps 1 through 5, keeping your yarn in front between each stitch until the row is complete.
Work slowly at first. Purling uses smaller, more fiddly hand movements than knitting, and most knitters find their speed catches up within a few rows of practice.
How Purl Combines With Knit to Make Stockinette
Once you're comfortable purling on its own, the real payoff comes from combining it with the knit stitch. The most common fabric in knitting, stockinette stitch, is made by alternating a full row of knit stitches with a full row of purl stitches.
Here's why that works: a knit stitch made on one side of the fabric looks like a purl bump when you turn the work over and look at the other side, and vice versa. So when you knit a row, turn your work, and then purl the next row, both rows end up showing their "knit" side to the same face of the fabric. Repeat that pattern — knit a row, turn, purl a row, turn — and you build up the smooth, flat "V" surface on one side (the right side) and the bumpy, textured surface on the other (the wrong side, sometimes called reverse stockinette).
If you'd rather see purl bumps on both sides at once, alternating knit and purl stitches within the same row instead of by row gives you ribbing or seed stitch — but that's a technique for another day. For now, focus on the simple rhythm of knit-row, purl-row, knit-row, purl-row, and you'll see stockinette fabric emerge in no time.
Common Purl Mistakes and How to Fix Them
Accidentally Knitting Instead of Purling
This is the most frequent beginner slip, and it almost always comes down to yarn position. If your working yarn drifts to the back of your work before you start a stitch, your needle will naturally fall into a knitting motion instead of a purling one. The fix is a habit: every time you finish a stitch and move to the next, glance down and confirm the yarn is sitting in front, resting between your needles, before you insert your needle again.
Twisted Stitches
If your purl stitches look more like a slanted "X" than a clean "V" on the next row, you likely wrapped the yarn clockwise instead of counterclockwise in step 3. Twisted stitches aren't dangerous to your project, but they do change the look of your fabric and can feel unexpectedly tight to work into on the following row. Slow down and double-check your wrap direction if you notice this happening.
Uneven Tension Between Knit and Purl Rows
Many beginners knit with fairly even tension but pull their purl stitches tighter (or looser) simply because the hand motion feels less familiar. Over a stockinette swatch, this shows up as a subtle ridge or banding pattern where purl rows look different in tightness from knit rows. This tends to resolve on its own with practice, but it helps to consciously relax your grip on the working yarn during purl rows and check your gauge periodically as you knit.
Losing Track of Which Row You're On
Because knit and purl stitches look so different once they're on the fabric, it's easy to lose your place mid-row, especially when switching between the two stitches. Remember the visual cue: knit stitches show as smooth Vs, purl stitches show as horizontal bumps. Learning to "read" your knitting this way — rather than only counting rows — will save you from a lot of frustrating unraveling.
Practice Makes It Automatic
The purl stitch rewards repetition more than almost any other technique in knitting. Cast on a wide swatch and alternate knit and purl rows until the motion feels automatic and your tension evens out. Once purling clicks, you'll have the two building blocks — knit and purl — needed to tackle nearly any stitch pattern, and a whole new world of textured knitting opens up.